Anthony Britneff
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The government's true agenda to have the forest industry including First Nations destroy the rarest-of-the-rare, at-risk, irreplaceable, large primary forests in British Columbia is nothing short of deliberate ecocide on a global scale. No-one including First Nations has the right to destroy the remaining primary forests. All need inviolate protection. Thanks to Ben Parfitt for exposing the NDP provincial government's double-dealing and duplicity on old growth and primary forests. We have long alleged government's shell game with conservation and protection ever since the first Old Growth Strategy in 1991. But we now have irrefutable proof. Friends who have responded to me on reading Ben's story of government subterfuge have done so using words like: disappointing, distressing, discouraging. These are not the words that will have the government change course. We need to write to our respective MLAs with strong words of outrage requesting the secret mapping project be terminated. Don't think about writing to your MLA; do it now. The provincial NDP must pay dearly for this deceit and for its betrayal of British Columbians. P.S. I just wrote an email expressing outrage to my MLA and copied it to the premier Find your MLA's email address at this web link: https://www.leg.bc.ca/learn-about-us/members The premier's email address is premier@gov.bc.ca -
The purposes and functions of existing forest legislation are inadequate to meet 21st century needs. WITH MANY FORESTRY COMMUNITIES upset with the poor stewardship of their local forests and with contamination of their drinking water from clearcut logging, one wonders why appeasing initiatives like the Old Growth Strategy (1991), the Protected Areas Strategy (1993), and the Old Growth Deferral Initiative (2021) have not delivered. The only substantive changes to how forests are stewarded, or not, have resulted from new legislation. Politicians eager to appease public concerns about forestry without conviction (i.e., without changing the law), do so by offering up these flavour-of-the-month, appeasing initiatives, which are bound to fizzle and fail because their requirement is not rooted in law. For example, the 1991 Old Growth Strategy morphed into the Protected Areas Strategy (1993) as a response to Canada’s commitment to the goals of the 1992 United Nations’ convention on biodiversity one of which is to conserve biodiversity. Instead of protecting representative areas of biodiversity across the province, the government ended up with about half the protected area being rock and ice in the alpine! Thirty years later in 2021, having side-lined the Old Growth Strategy of 1991, the government initiated the Old Growth Deferral Initiative to appease public opposition to the logging of primary forests. Over two years this initiative has become an exercise in “talk-and-log” while the primary forests continue to be destroyed. Having blown the chance to protect a representative framework of provincial biodiversity in the 1993 Protected Areas Strategy, the government is at it again, thirty years later, with the latest appeasing initiative -- the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health Framework. The big changes in forest stewardship happened in 1978 with the passing of the Ministry of Forests and Range Act and a brand-new Forest Act; in 1995 with the enactment of the Forest Practices Code of British Columbia Act; in 2002 with the passing of the Forest and Range Practices Act; and in 2004 with the rescinding of the Code. The passing of the Forest and Range Practices Act and the rescinding of the Code fettered the responsibility of government to steward the forests. That responsibility no longer resides in forest legislation and has been devolved to industry and the resource professionals. What is significant about the legislative changes after 1978 is that the 1978 Ministry of Forests and Range Act survived and remains in force today. Why is that? In a nutshell, the answer is that the Act does not provide the forests ministry with a stewardship purpose. All the other main forestry acts since 1978 deal with HOW the forests are stewarded; whereas the Ministry of Forests and Range Act spells out WHY the forest ministry exists and WHAT it does as described by five purposes and functions—it is the mission statement for the ministry. So, what are the five purposes and functions of the forest ministry? For the most part, they are timber-centric and industry-focused: To encourage maximum productivity of the forest and range resources in British Columbia; To manage, protect and conserve the forests and range resources of the government, having regard to the immediate and long-term economic and social benefits they may confer on British Columbia; To plan the use of the forests and range resources of the government, so that the production of timber and forage, the harvesting of timber, the grazing of livestock and the realization of fisheries, wildlife, water, outdoor recreation and other natural resource values are coordinated and integrated, in consultation and cooperation with other ministries and agencies of the government and with the private sector; To encourage a vigorous, efficient and world competitive timber processing industry, and ranching sector in British Columbia; and, To assert the financial interest of the government in its forest and range resources in a systematic and equitable manner. These five purposes and functions may have served the interests of British Columbia in the late 1970s but not into the ’80s and ’90s, and certainly not into the 21st century. Astonishingly, in 2024, the forest ministry has no stewardship purpose for the conservation of biodiversity, soil and water, for the maintenance of ecosystem health and for the sustainable use of forest resources. We need to re-write the purposes of the forest ministry to include a stewardship purpose in a new Ministry of Forests Act for the 21st century that will strengthen ecological stewardship with enforceable regulations in all forest legislation. Anthony Britneff worked for the B.C. Forest Service for 40 years holding senior professional positions in inventory, silviculture and forest health.
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David Elstone’s ablution of the forest industry is history by omission, a version that does not withstand closer scrutiny. What Elstone fails to tell readers is that the forest industry made its own bed and is responsible, not for the mountain pine infestation itself, but for the way in which it chose to log dead wood and where. The forest ministry’s own records show that the industry did not log only dead trees but also plenty of live trees in its salvage operations, often more valuable tree species than beetle-infected lodgepole pine. The ministry's own data shows that in several interior timber supply areas, non-salvage logging exceeded its mid-term timber supply projections. Additionally, the ministry’s records of cutblock layout and of permit dates indicate that the forest industry deliberately first logged infested pine forests closest to their mills thereby making worse the problem of finding timber economical to log at a later date. Perhaps these two facts give rise to an alternative version of events to that portrayed by Elstone and explain how the forest industry exacerbated the timber supply crisis of today. As to Elstone’s trumpeting of a recent study that found that 85 per cent of the B.C. pellet industry’s fibre supply comes from byproducts of sawmills, we are left asking: Who financed the study? Drax. Who provided the data? Drax. And why didn’t the UBC faculty member and forest professionals who authored the study use the same data sourced by Ben Parfitt from official government records? Finally, Elstone is vexatious to impugn Ben Parfitt for saying that the date on which infestations began was in 2009. This is obviously a reporting or editorial error, not one made by Ben Parfitt, who wrote a major documentary titled “Battling the Beetle" in 2005.
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Len and David: Although the removal of the "unduly' clause is symbolic, I agree that it might be a signal from premier Eby of better forest policy and management to come . . . we shall see. But the premier's announcement is not a paradigm shift from "business as usual" (oligopoly, clearcutting and subsidies). Prior to 1978, the BC Forest Service managed provincial forests by eighty-one public sustained yield units (PSYU). By the early 1970's many PSYUs were badly overcut. Around 1978, the then director of forest inventory, Frank Hegyi, who had good technical foresight, wisely planned to increase the scale of resolution of the forest inventory from public sustained yield units (PSYU) to smaller landscape units. The Inventory Branch had delineated landscape units for the province. Former deputy minister, Mike Apsey (newly arrived from the CEO position at COFI) disallowed this change. Apsey had different plans: to decrease the scale of resolution of forest inventory, planning and management from eighty-one PSYUs to thirty-six timber supply areas (TSA), thereby averaging the AAC over large TSAs that included overcut and undercut PSYUs. As I understand the proposed Forest Landscape Plan in premier Eby's announcement, areas of primary forest to be conserved and areas where logging is planned will be spatially defined. That is good in itself. But the devil in the detail for the new Forest Landscape Plan will be the estimation of timber supply because the inventory and the timber supply review (TSR) process that inform allowable annual cut (AAC) determinations are outdated. Also, the forest ministry’s growth-and-yield models for the estimation of timber volumes are statistically inappropriate for use at the polygon scale of resolution for landscape units.
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BC'S current logging industry should be allowed to fail
Anthony Britneff commented on Anthony Britneff's record in Comment
Hi Margaret, Thank you for your well considered comment. In response to the selected quotation from your comment, I remind readers that every clearcut is approved by a government forester, who has sworn an oath of allegiance to the Crown, the trustee of public forests on behalf of the public. Further, that same forester is a member of Forest Professionals BC (new name, previously called the Association of BC Forest Professionals) to which all practising foresters belong. The Professional Governance Act, which replaced the Foresters Act, requires Forest Professionals BC to serve and protect the public interest with respect to the conduct of registered professionals. Furthermore, Forest Professionals BC has a Code of Ethical and Professional Conduct embodied within bylaw 9. Within this code of ethics, under a section titled "Standard 2 - Independence", a practising forester is required to exhibit objectivity and independence in fact and appearance by, among other requirements, upholding the public interest and professional principles above the demands of employment or personal gain. So contrary to your assertion, I find it entirely reasonable to expect practising foresters to obey provincial laws and regulations and to abide by the bylaws of their governing body by giving priority to the public interest over the interest of employers. Most would agree that destruction of public forests (biodiversity, soil, water, carbon and air) is not in the public interest. What has happened by way of destruction to the forests of the province under the mismanagement of professional foresters over the past 50 years shows me that collectively they are a failed profession. As to the future, I will say that Professor John Innes, the former dean of forestry at UBC, did much to improve the education of forestry students. My hope is that a new generation of foresters will have a good basic grounding in conservation biology, in hydrology and in forest ecology that will enable them to abhor the extensive destruction of our forests (biodiversity, soil, water, carbon and air) perpetrated by their predecessors through excessive clearcutting and will motivate them to work towards repairing the damage. Finally, I need to acknowledge my part in the collective failure of the profession. I was a registered professional forester in B.C. for almost four decades. I resigned my membership on January 7, 2022. I resigned because, in good conscience, I could no longer belong to Forest Professionals BC when I consider that the harm done by some of its members to biodiversity, soil, water, carbon and air far out-weighs the good done by many members working for the public and private sectors and for some First Nations. Forest Professionals BC by association and some of its members had become for me agents of ecocide. -
We need to move from “fibre exploitation” to forest reparation. Only if we manage forests for the sustainability of biodiversity, soil, air and water can we derive through sustainable use of forest resources the economic and social benefits that intact forest ecosystems bestow. IN TWO DECADES, employment in British Columbia’s forest industry has fallen by more than 40,000 direct jobs, and the industry today contributes only two per cent to B.C.’s gross domestic product while employing only two per cent of the province’s workers. Given this, why all the hullabaloo about the loss of 300 Canfor jobs in Prince George? And why another knee-jerk government response in the form of a new subsidy, amounting to $90-million? This is the same old pattern repeating itself, a pattern of subsidization following an industry downturn that has contributed to the decline of the very industry that the subsidies ironically purported to support. A flagrant example of government subsidies that has accelerated the crisis in our forests is a Ponzi scheme known as “crediting,” which awards some of the biggest forest companies in the province with more trees to cut down when they deliver “lower quality” logs to the province’s wood pellet and wood pulp industries. Examples of other direct subsidies that have accelerated the loss of the province’s forests include those for forest management and electricity. The largest subsidies by far are indirect such as those for carbon and for the loss of carbon sequestration capacity. In recent years, the annual cost of all these subsidies is roughly equivalent to the industry’s contribution to the provincial GDP. More beguiling than subsidies is industry propaganda. Through misrepresentation about sustainable forest management, the industry bamboozles the public and importers of B.C.’s forest products with phoney certification schemes. The federal competition board is presently investigating two certification schemes for misrepresentation. Even government politicians and senior government officials, who should know better, parrot the rhetoric of “sustainability” and sing the praises of certification, sending a false signal to the public that all is well. Acting as a suction pump for public subsidies, the industry—dominated on the coast by Western Forest Products and in the interior by Canfor and West Fraser—directly controls most of the timber in public forests and is largely self-regulated—quirkily known as professional reliance. Given excessive subsidies and self-regulation, no one should expect the industry to rationalize its activities in the public interest by lowering the boom on logging, processing more logs in B.C. and reinvesting profits in secondary manufacturing facilities in the province. Anyone doubting this need only ask why BC forest companies have invested so heavily over the last few years in mills and forest operations in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Georgia and Louisiana. B.C.’s industry as presently constituted needs to fail completely, as must the weak legislative framework that allows it to clear-cut most of the province’s primary and old-growth forests to the detriment of biodiversity, soil, air and water. Many millions of hectares of BC have been logged, burned, replanted and then burned again by forest fires—to the point of exhaustion. The image above shows 1700 hectares, now typical of the tortured Chilcotin Plateau. We need to move from “fibre exploitation” to forest reparation. Only if we manage forests for the sustainability of biodiversity, soil, air and water can we derive through sustainable use of forest resources the economic and social benefits that intact forest ecosystems bestow. To do this, legislation must be repealed and re-written to place ecosystem management on a legally enforceable footing and forestry schools must be renamed: for example, the UBC Faculty of Forestry might be renamed the UBC Faculty of Ecology. Foresters are a failed profession in B.C. Meanwhile, the export of raw logs and egregiously low-value products like wood pellets must be immediately halted. By curtailing these exports, we can reduce the supply of timber to move toward a sustainable rate of logging that provides for the economic needs of British Columbians to build houses and to make furniture and other value-added products. Let the entrepreneurs have free-market access to the timber they need to build small-scale, community-based, secondary manufacturing facilities. This could be achieved by cancelling tenures and forest licences and by auctioning all publicly owned timber at regional log markets. But here expectations must be tempered. The promise of value-added only works if there are healthy forests containing quality wood. First, though, we must immediately bring logging rates way down and start to build a new, value-focussed industry from the ground up. Anthony Britneff is a Victoria resident who worked for the B.C. Forest Service for 40 years holding senior professional positions in inventory, silviculture and forest health. -
On the one hand, Mike Harcourt's NDP government introduced the Forest Practices Code of BC Act BUT, on the other hand, it invoked a policy to limit the impact of non-timber values (e.g., biodiversity, water soil and visual quality) on timber supply to six (6) per cent.
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British Columbia’s Big Lie
Anthony Britneff commented on David Broadland's record in Fact-checking mindustry myths
Thank you. A brilliant piece of investigative journalism that ties together so much of what scientists, conservationists, informed citizens, and even bureaucrats courageous enough to speak the truth, have been saying ever since Claude Richmond, the last Social Credit forests minister, initiated in 1990/91 the Old Growth Strategy (1992) and the Protected Area Strategy (1993). The Harcourt (1991), G. Clark (1996), Miller (1999), Dosanjh (2000) and Campbell (2001) provincial governments all failed to implement the Old Growth Strategy and ignored it. The opportunity to conserve biodiversity was largely lost by the time Christy Clark became premier in 2011. The Protected Area Strategy ended up protecting far more rock and ice than it did biodiversity. The six (6) percent cap as policy to limit the impact that non-timber values (e.g., water, soil, biodiversity, visual quality) could have on the province's timber supply was initiated by the Harcourt NDP government after Andrew Petter, the forests minister, had introduced the Forest Practices Code of BC Act (1995), which preceded the Forest and Range Practices Act (2002). Originally the Harcourt government set the overall cap at 6 per cent. However, the biodiversity measures increased the impact on timber supply to 8 per cent. In order to reduce the overall cap to 6 per cent for all non-timber values including biodiversity, the forests ministry reduced the impacts for visual quality to gain back the 2 per cent(1). Most of the member foresters of the Association of BC Forest Professionals have never understood the science of conservation biology as it was not part of their education. As a consequence, most professional foresters tasked with managing public forestlands are ecological illiterates(2) incapable of advising Eby and Ralston against continuing to promulgate the "big lie". References Old Growth Strategy(1992): https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/library/documents/Bib1569.pdf Protected Areas Strategy (1993): https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/library/documents/bib7332.pdf Footnotes (1) Source: Ministry of Forests, "Forest Practices Code - Timber Supply Analysis" (February 1996). The report shows how new management practices under the Code will affect timber supply when compared to pre-Code practices (see attachment). (2) Including myself . . . at least I recognized this deficiency in my forestry education fairly early in my career and made an effort through self-study to learn about conservation biology and rudimentary ecology. MOF_FPC_Timber-Supply_Feb 1996.pdf -
The UBC forestry faculty needs to go back to school on carbon sequestration for promulgating bull like this: “As long as intensive silviculture is practised in forest management, the carbon sequestration of younger working forests can be more productive than mature forests as a carbon sink" . . . If you’re committed to more intensive management, I can double the carbon stock on that forest,” . . . “The working forest is a better carbon sink in general.” Source: BIV 10 November 2022, "Climate smart forestry" at https://biv.com/article/2022/11/climate-smart-forestry
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Once again, great policy research and superb journalism. Thank you. A bitter pill for the dinosaurs in the forestry sector and profession to swallow.
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The last of the green gold
Anthony Britneff commented on James Steidle's record in Examples of engaging the mindustry:
Once again, great policy research and superb journalism. Thank you. A bitter pill for the dinosaurs in the forestry sector and profession to swallow. -
Teal Jones' TFL 46 is publicly owned land and includes the Fairy Creek watershed. The timber supply review process allows for public discussion of Teal Jones' management plan for the tree farm licence (TFL). As a part of that public discussion, professional forester Martin Watts submitted to Teal Jones eight questions about, and a further eight comments on, its management plan for TFL 46, a plan which staff with the forests ministry had previously reviewed. This leads me to ask additional questions: Was the plan crafted by professional foresters? If so, by whom? Was the plan reviewed by professional foresters in the forests ministry? If so, by whom? Does the plan accommodate the public's interest? A professional forester is bound ethically by the Association of BC Forest Professionals to uphold the public interest. Do Martin Watts' questions and comments point to incompetence on the part of professional foresters crafting the plan and those within the forests ministry reviewing the plan?
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Re: “B.C.’s wildfire strategy is leaving whole communities behind,” op-ed, Times Colonist, Feb. 4. Lori Daniels and Robert Gray do not mention the role played by clearcuts and young plantations in the recent mega-fires. These mega-fires were mostly ignited in clearcuts and then spread rapidly through vast areas of highly flammable, young plantations. This observation appears to be borne out by satellite imagery. Yet, in this op-ed, the words "plantation" and "clearcut" are not to be found. Surely the role of clearcuts and plantations in the recent mega wildfires has not escaped the notice of these two leading forest-fire experts? So, why the omission? Is it deliberate? If so, why? For two authors that advocate "going big and bold”, why would they not recommend that the forest industry and government take remedial action to mitigate against wildfire (and against massive carbon emissions from logging) by reducing or stopping industrial clearcutting? That would certainly be bold.
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This hard-core analysis puts the lie to three lines from the mantra frequently chanted by the forests ministry and industry (mindustry); repeated ad nauseum by industry lobbyists like the Truck Loggers’ Association (TLA), Council of Forest Industries (COFI) and Resource Works (RW); and parroted by the United Steelworkers union (USW) and industry-friendly journalists: B.C.’s forests are sustainably managed for timber production; B.C.’s forests that meet the certification standards of the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and/or the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) are sustainably managed; and, B.C.’s chief foresters since 2004 are independent and their allowable annual cuts are unfettered, professional determinations. Understandably, the result of this constant barrage of misinformation, disinformation and misrepresentation is a confused and duped general public, not to mention the First Nations negotiating forest agreements with the provincial government. If the mindustry's deception continues unchecked by First Nations' and public scrutiny, First Nations will likely find their forest agreements to have more timber on paper than is to be found on the ground, and those most vulnerable among us will be badly, if not mortally, affected by an increasing frequency in the occurrence of floods, water contamination, landslides, heat waves and wildfire. Collectively, we have an ethical responsibility to mitigate against these dangers as best we can. The TLA, COFI and RW frequently bleat that an open, frank dialogue on forestry is needed, based on science. Any dialogue needs first to have all sides to the discussion acknowledge that science tells us that clearcut logging is: Destroying terrestrial and aquatic habitats, extirpating species and driving others to extinction; Fouling drinking water for communities; Ravaging soil and the fungal life necessary for forest health; Releasing vast amounts of carbon from below and above ground into the atmosphere; Disturbing large and small watersheds both of which are highly sensitive to clearcut logging resulting in flooding and landslides; and, Causing in part the large, rapidly moving and intense wildfires of recent years. With no acceptance of the science, the forest industry has forfeited its right to dialogue and the government must disassociate from industry and start to regulate in the public interest, which includes community safety. This begins with the drafting of new forest legislation, the banning of all logging of primary forests, the ending of log exports, and the reduction of the annual timber harvest by as much as 80 per cent. But the uncertain future presently unfolding and made the worse by the deepening climate emergency, is a future that belongs to all of us. All of us have a duty to end the mindustry's deceptions and to hold the provincial government and forest industry accountable for damages, both at the ballot box and in the law courts.
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This hard-core analysis puts the lie to three lines from the mantra frequently chanted by the forests ministry and industry (mindustry); repeated ad nauseum by industry lobbyists like the Truck Loggers’ Association (TLA), Council of Forest Industries (COFI) and Resource Works (RW); and parroted by the United Steelworkers union (USW) and industry-friendly journalists: B.C.’s forests are sustainably managed for timber production; B.C.’s forests that meet the certification standards of the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and/or the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) are sustainably managed; and, B.C.’s chief foresters since 2004 are independent and their allowable annual cuts are unfettered, professional determinations. Understandably, the result of this constant barrage of misinformation, disinformation and misrepresentation is a confused and duped general public, not to mention the First Nations negotiating forest agreements with the provincial government. If the mindustry's deception continues unchecked by First Nations' and public scrutiny, First Nations will likely find their forest agreements to have more timber on paper than is to be found on the ground, and those most vulnerable among us will be badly, if not mortally, affected by an increasing frequency in the occurrence of floods, water contamination, landslides, heat waves and wildfire. Collectively, we have an ethical responsibility to mitigate against these dangers as best we can. The TLA, COFI and RW frequently bleat that an open, frank dialogue on forestry is needed, based on science. Any dialogue needs first to have all sides to the discussion acknowledge that science tells us that clearcut logging is: Destroying terrestrial and aquatic habitats, extirpating species and driving others to extinction; Fouling drinking water for communities; Ravaging soil and the fungal life necessary for forest health; Releasing vast amounts of carbon from below and above ground into the atmosphere; Disturbing large and small watersheds both of which are highly sensitive to clearcut logging resulting in flooding and landslides; and, Causing in part the large, rapidly moving and intense wildfires of recent years. With no acceptance of the science, the forest industry has forfeited its right to dialogue and the government must disassociate from industry and start to regulate in the public interest, which includes community safety. This begins with the drafting of new forest legislation, the banning of all logging of primary forests, the ending of log exports, and the reduction of the annual timber harvest by as much as 80 per cent. But the uncertain future presently unfolding and made the worse by the deepening climate emergency, is a future that belongs to all of us. All of us have a duty to end the mindustry's deceptions and to hold the provincial government and forest industry accountable for damages, both at the ballot box and in the law courts.
